Asus is first to the party with a Thunderbolt 2-certified motherboard

Other devices, including the new Mac Pro, will follow.

If you use Thunderbolt accessories but aren't an Apple user, some good news: Asus has just announced its Z87-Deluxe Quad, a Haswell motherboard that is the first to include Intel's newest Thunderbolt 2 controller. As we've written before, these controllers double Thunderbolt's theoretical bandwidth from 10Gbps to 20Gbps, which improves support for 4K displays while allowing you to simultaneously drive a display and transfer files.

The new motherboard (which is based on Intel's Z87 chipset) includes two Thunderbolt 2 ports as well as six USB 3.0 ports (plus support for two more via a USB header), four USB 2.0 ports (plus header support for four more), HDMI out, dual Gigabit Ethernet ports, 10 SATA III ports, integrated dual-band 802.11ac and Bluetooth 4.0, and two PCI Express 3.0 ports with 16 lanes apiece. Unfortunately, the premium motherboard also comes with a premium price tag: Newegg currently lists it for a wallet-busting $349.99.

This news comes shortly after the announcement of USB 3.1, a new version of the spec designed to support Thunderbolt-esque maximum speeds of 10Gbps. Thunderbolt and Thunderbolt 2 are available today, while USB 3.1 devices are still months or years away at best, but one of the largest barriers to widespread Thunderbolt adoption has been the ubiquitous availability of the fast-enough, cheap-enough USB spec. The retail availability of Thunderbolt 2 controllers means that we can expect other motherboards and systems that use the spec to follow in the coming months. The most significant of these is the new cylindrical Mac Pro, which will include six of the new ports, but we also suspect that new Retina MacBook Pros could pack Thunderbolt 2 ports to differentiate them a bit from the 2013 MacBook Airs.

Monitors up to 4K can be served by Displayport without the Thunderbolt overlay (like the DP ports on a PCIe graphic card).

External drive arrays can be served by USB3 - you'll lose some performance but unless your external array is made of SSDs, that's basically irrelevant.

Thunderbolt is external PCIe, long-distance connections to peripherals (after the optical link layer becomes available) or an universal "docking station" . Those are Thunderbolt's markets not served by USB3.

I WANT Thunderbolt to succeed, but let's be realistic here. Horses for courses.

Thunderbolt (as in PCIe over a serial connection outside of a case) could also be used for connecting "CPU" to "GPU" and "IO" enclosures for clustering of heterogeneous blocks with PCIe.

Monitors up to 4K can be served by Displayport without the Thunderbird overlay (like the DP ports on a PCIe graphic card).

External drive arrays can be served by USB3 - you'll lose some performance but unless your external array is made of SSDs, that's basically irrelevant.

Thunderbird is external PCIe, long-distance connections to peripherals (after the optical link layer becomes available) or an universal "docking station" . Those are Thunderbird's markets not served by USB3.

I WANT Thunderbird to succeed, but let's be realistic here. Horses for courses.

"As a PC User, I have absolutely no interest in Thunderbolt or it's capabilities (like being hot-swappable, daisy chained, carry any protocol, carry power or use for a monitor cable) yet I feel compelled to predict it's inevitable failure whenever possible, ad nauseum. I hope this will somehow convince others who are too unfortunate not to share my biased opinion already come to see the light and make Thunderbolt go away. Those dirty heathens..."

"And I will still doggedly associate Thunderbolt with Macs regardless that it's an Intel thing. You will of course agree with me because I am RANDOM FORUM POSTER!"

$349 isn't cheap for a motherboard, but "wallet-busting"? Jeez, us old-timers must have all been millionaires in the '80s and '90s given what we paid for computers and electronics back then.

Compare it to the Z87-PLUS. Very similar featureset (minus the wifi and the Thunderbolt) and it costs $160. Who needs Wifi in their desktop machine anyway? Probably not the guy plopping down $350 for his mobo.

When even cheap SSDs become too fast for SATA, USB won't be much help.

The next spec of USB bumps it up to speeds capable of supporting today's SSDs.

Currently, we've got three primary disk/peripheral interconnects: Thunderbolt, USB, and SATA and each is currently in flux. (Five if you count HDMI and Ethernet.) So while progress is generally a good thing, it also comes at a cost, namely Internet flame wars. It's a shame we can't harness all the energy that goes into the inevitalbe bickering and use it to charge our devices (using non-standardized wireless charging technology.)

"As a PC User, I have absolutely no interest in Thunderbolt or it's capabilities (like being hot-swappable, daisy chained, carry any protocol, carry power or use for a monitor cable) yet I feel compelled to predict it's inevitable failure whenever possible, ad nauseum. I hope this will somehow convince others who are too unfortunate not to share my biased opinion already come to see the light and make Thunderbolt go away. Those dirty heathens..."

If it ain't SCSI, it's just warm and fuzzy!

Kids these days, with their thumb drives and Solid State Disks that don't have any disks...

$349 isn't cheap for a motherboard, but "wallet-busting"? Jeez, us old-timers must have all been millionaires in the '80s and '90s given what we paid for computers and electronics back then.

Welcome to the marvel of mass production.

Thanks for enlightening me, I hadn't realized it was mass production that made people into such terrible whiners about prices. Now pardon me while I go back to enjoying my bespoke, artisanal computer ...

When even cheap SSDs become too fast for SATA, USB won't be much help.

The next spec of USB bumps it up to speeds capable of supporting today's SSDs.

Currently, we've got three primary disk/peripheral interconnects: Thunderbolt, USB, and SATA and each is currently in flux. (Five if you count HDMI and Ethernet.) So while progress is generally a good thing, it also comes at a cost, namely Internet flame wars. It's a shame we can't harness all the energy that goes into the inevitalbe bickering and use it to charge our devices (using non-standardized wireless charging technology.)

Don't even get me started on HDBase-T (HDMI 4K, Ethernet, USB and power over a single CAT6 run) - Yes please.

Now if only Intel would stop crippling Thunderbolt by denying certification to anyone who attempts to build a Thunderbolt -> PCI-e bridge. Time again companies have demonstrated these (usually as part of an external GPU setup) and time and again Intel have denied them thunderbolt certification, shutting them down.

$349 isn't cheap for a motherboard, but "wallet-busting"? Jeez, us old-timers must have all been millionaires in the '80s and '90s given what we paid for computers and electronics back then.

Welcome to the marvel of mass production.

Thanks for enlightening me, I hadn't realized it was mass production that made people into such terrible whiners about prices. Now pardon me while I go back to enjoying my bespoke, artisanal computer ...

Something important the story failed to cover is how this 'bandwidth is doubled'.

The throughput of the individual channels is not improved (thus consequently none of the lanes either). Similarly, no additional channels/lanes are added.

Speed is improved by simply allowing devices to use both channels for itself, rather than having one as a pass-through. The total bandwidth of thunderbolt in other words remains unchanged, but devices which require very high levels of bandwidth (such as 4k displays) can now reserve both channels should they require it.

In total, the maximum transmit of 20gbps and receive of 20gbps remains.

$349 isn't cheap for a motherboard, but "wallet-busting"? Jeez, us old-timers must have all been millionaires in the '80s and '90s given what we paid for computers and electronics back then.

Welcome to the marvel of mass production.

Thanks for enlightening me, I hadn't realized it was mass production that made people into such terrible whiners about prices. Now pardon me while I go back to enjoying my bespoke, artisanal computer ...

So, if I plug in a video card to one of the board's PCIe slots, can the video output from the card be routed to the motherboard's thunderbolt port?

I'm almost certain that it's a negative there.

Probably depends on the PCIe card: After Intel squished their chipset business (the last Nvidia chipsets were for Core2s, they were denied a license to implement QPI, so no Corei3/5/7 chipsets from them) Nvidia cooked up their 'Optimus' arrangement, which allows at least their mobile GPUs to dump output to the Intel integrated graphics system, to avoid the added expense of video-source switching in hardwware(the laptop display and any external ports always hang off the integrated GPU, with the Nvidia one optionally pushing its output into the framebuffer over PCIe).

I think that is only officially blessed on laptops with Nvidia mobile GPUs built in; but it would very much surprise me if either Intel or Nvidia built their desktop and laptop parts with sufficiently different software interfaces that Nvidia couldn't enable it for desktop parts if they felt like it.

ATI has something similar; but only for cooperation between its own integrated GPUs and its own discrete GPUs, so adding framebuffer access for Intel IGPs would probably be a more significant change.

Either way, I doubt that it's officially blessed; but I suspect that Nvidia drivers might be within hacking distance with ATI ones probably wouldn't.

"Unfortunately, the premium motherboard also comes with a premium price tag: Newegg currently lists it for a wallet-busting $349.99."

The Anandtech article upon which this was based says "we’re awaiting further details on expected availability and pricing, but given the Z87-Deluxe/Dual runs $350 we’d expect the new board to come in above that price point." The board linked in this article to seems to be their current Thunderbolt 1-equipped model, not the new one.

Something the VAST majority of users do not need is the answer? That's why it's niche right now. Most people can get by just fine with connection to the storage server via gbe or the like... if they even need that much space. It's pretty easy to fit a few TB into a case these days (well... for some computers, anyway) if someone just needs space and that's mostly what folks need these days. Bandwidth at those levels is for niche players.